Pages

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Changes that creep up on us

Sitting in
the train yesterday I was brought up short by one of those endless
announcements that now annoyingly punctuate every journey.“Customers are advised….”Each time I hear the word “customer”, it
irritates me.Since when have passengers
transformed themselves into customers?I think of
customers as people who pay for some service, passengers as people who travel
in some kind of vehicle.Is this then
another sign of today’s overwhelming interest in money above all?And what was wrong with seeing me as a
passenger, as all travellers in any vehicle have always been known as?I somehow can’t see an 18th
century coach driver calling his passengers customers. What is the rationale
behind this, I wonder, except perhaps to give some work to some office
somewhere in British Rail charged with finding
new ways of saying old things?It
intrigues me why a change such of this has been thought necessary.And this has set me thinking about other new
ways of saying old things which have puzzled me.There is, for example, the recent replacement
of the good old word “alias” by the clumsy abbreviation “aka” (“also known
as”).Again, what was wrong with
“alias”?And then,
to add to the odd things I have noticed, comes the disappearance of the Request
Stop for buses on London’s
roads.In the good old days there were
two sorts of bus stops, the ones at which all buses stopped irrespective of whether
anybody was waiting.You simply got up
from your seat in the bus and waited for the bus to stop without ringing the
bell.And if you were waiting at the bus
stop you did not need to wave the bus down, but just waited for it to stop, as
you knew it would.Request Stop signs
were red, unlike the main stops which were and still are white, and were the ones
where you, as a passenger (not a customer!), would need to stop the bus by
signalling to it.If you were not paying
much attention, and did not signal quickly enough, the bus simply sailed on by.Then I
started to notice that people were ringing the bell inside the bus at whatever
stop we were coming to, Request Stop or not.And buses no longer stopped at stops which were not Request Stops. When
did they start doing this and why?Now
everybody rings the bell at every stop, and everybody puts out a hand to stop
the bus they want at whatever stop.I
realise that I don’t know whether all the red Request Stop signs have been
replaced, or are simply being ignored, so today I will be looking out of my bus
window (my usual mode of transport wherever I go in London) to check this.This is
another sign of the fact that we are now constantly being asked to do more and
more work ourselves.Where before I could
leave it to the bus driver simply to draw in at many of the stops, now I have
to make sure that I take steps to stop him (or increasingly her).And in a book I read recently, it was pointed
out that the computerized world of ours, by giving us the tools to do things
like booking our own travel or buying our own shopping in supermarkets,
actually makes each of us individually work harder and harder doing things
which in the past other people did for us, such as travel agents and shop
assistants.We simply used to ask a
travel agent to book us on a flight on such and such a day for such and such a
place, and then waited for the phone call telling us that they had made the
booking, and the letter to arrive with the airline ticket.Of course there weren’t all the cheap flights
around, and this is what we may have to accept in return for cheaper
flights.Yet even expensive flights,
like mine to China, now require that I do all the work on my computer, trying
to fathom all the complex choices I am confronted with, just as it is now up to
me to make sure that I stop any bus I want to get on to.